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Monthly Archives: September 2014

While travelling around Japan, I had to write down my ‘home’ address practically every time I checked into accommodation, as well as most instances when I had to fill out paperwork. While I did not have to write down my ‘home’ address quite as often during my two-month return trip to Taiwan or my two-week trip to Hong Kong, it was something which still came up (such as when applying for hiking permits).

The only address I could fill out was my parents’ address in San Francisco, since that is the only physical address which is a reliable means of reaching me. Filling out my address in Taoyuan would be pointless since I no longer rent that apartment.

It got especially bizarre when a post office in Naha insisted that I write both a ‘to’ and a ‘from’ address, and said that the ‘from’ address should be ‘my’ address. I pointed out that the ‘to’ address was in fact ‘my’ address and that it makes no sense for the ‘to’ and ‘from’ addresses to be identical. I eventually persuaded them to let me list the post office as the ‘from’ address.

People often ask me where I am from, and I reply ‘San Francisco’, and sometimes they reply ‘oh, what do you do in San Francisco?’

Well, ever since I have started this blog, I have not even been in North America, let alone that address in San Francisco.

Even though that is the address I use for paperwork, I do not live there right now, nor in Taoyuan. So where do I live? Wherever I am at the moment.

In a way, I am a drifter now, albeit with the privilege of a ‘permanent’ address, which sets me apart from many other drifters.

And why is having a ‘permanent’ address so special? I suspect that, among other things, by having an ‘address’ (albeit one where I have not been physically present for years), I can prove I am an addressed person, rather than one of those other people. And this can be a tool of oppression – for example, homeless people trying to go to state universities sometimes have trouble proving that they are eligible for in-state tuition because they do not have an address.

I suppose that the place where I sleep – wherever it is – is also my home, albeit temporarily. I am turning quite a few corners of Northeast Asia into my home in this manner. Right now, I am editing this post in Bifuka.

And I am learning not to get too attached to my ‘home’. I can thank a place for being my ‘home’, and let it go, knowing that there are other ‘homes’ for me in the world. I feel quite comfortable with having said goodbye to Taoyuan, and I suspect that, should I ever need to say goodbye to San Francisco forever, it would be possible to do it in a peaceful way (assuming the circumstances of the departure were peaceful).

To the extent possible under law,the person who associated CC0
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Prefectures Which I Visited But Did Not Stay Overnight:
Shiga (Kansai)
Okayama (Chugoku)

Here is I made a map showing which prefectures I visited during my first trip to Japan and this second trip to Japan: blue = first trip, red = second trip, and purple = both trips (and this map does not show Okinawa – I visited during my first trip)

So, what were the highlights of my second trip to Japan?

Favorite Flower: Komakusa (you can see a photo in this post)
Favorite Show: Tough choice. I keep on changing my mind, so I will make this a three-way tie for 1st place between Live Doom in Niseko, Earth Celebration / Umi by the Kodo Drummers, and Elisabeth by the Takarazuka Revue.
Favorite Mountain: Rishiri-Fuji
Favorite Serving of Matcha Tea: At the teahouse at Hikone Castle – they serve one of the best traditional desserts I have had in Japan
Favorite Castle: Matsumoto Castle. It is worth staying overnight in Matsumoto just to see the castle at night.
Favorite Garden: Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu
Favorite City: Hida-Takayama (Gifu)
Favorite Place That Nobody Has Heard of: Bifuka, Hokkaido
Favorite Island: Rebun Island
Favorite Bird: Much as I adore the Rock Ptarmigan, my favorite bird is the ever-graceful Red-Crowned Crane (seen in this post)
Favorite Village: Ainokura (Toyama) (yeah, it is touristy, but it still brims with charm)
Favorite Religious Place: Haguro-san (Dewa Sanzan)
Favorite Buddhist Temple: Risshaku-ji (Yamadera)
Favorite Shinto/Shugendo Shrine: Ishizuchi Shrine, which also happens to be near the highest point in western Japan, and that mountain put up a good fight to get the ‘favorite mountain’ listing.
Favorite Journey by Public Transit (land): Tateyama-Kurobe Alpen Route
Favorite Journey by Public Transit (sea): Riding the Hamayuu, a ship operated by Kampu Ferry.
Favorite Onsen: Noboribetsu Onsen (see this post)
Favorite Lake: Tazawa-ko (Akita)
Favorite Wetlands: the alpine wetlands on the slopes of Hakkoda-san

Overall, my favorite region of Japan is Hokkaido.

Now, as you can see in the map, my first trip focused on Kansai, Chugoku, Kyushu, and (not in the map) the islands south of Kyushu. Overall that trip was a good, engaging experience, but I was happy to leave Japan when it was over. During my first trip, I found a country largely devoid of beauty, except in the islands south of Kyushu and a few isolated spots here and there. I also found an overwhelmingly beaten tourist path running right along the shinkansen line from Kyoto to Kagoshima, though the foreign tourists are thinner in places such as Okayama, and even in the tourist-dense parts of Kansai it is not that hard to get away from the tourists (want to get away from tourists in Kyoto? Then visit a church run by a Christian sect which originated in Kyoto). And I did go to places such as Yoron Island, Wakayama, and Shimane, which are most certainly not on the super-beaten track.

Why the distaste for the super-beaten path? Well, sometimes I like the beaten path, but I feel that once a place is so overrun with foreign tourists that I hear way more Mandarin/English than Japanese being spoken, it makes it harder to connect to Japan, and I came to Japan for *Japan*.

Well, in the second trip, I got well off the track for foreign tourists (though I still managed to encounter plenty of other foreign tourists) and I often was asked “How did you know about this place?”

It made all of the difference. In Tohoku, in the mountains of central Honshu and central Shikoku, and especially in Hokkaido, I discovered just how many beautiful mountains, rivers, lakes, flowers and forests Japan has. I also got a much better sense of just how much cultural/regional variation there is in Japan during this trip. I also got to interact a lot more with Japanese people. In Hokkaido, I spent very little time visiting temples (and the temples in Hokkaido feel different from other Japanese temples), I did not have much traditional Japanese food, and I did not visit a single castle, but got a feel for Hokkaido’s own culture (hint: a lot of talented musicians live in Hokkaido). When I returned to Honshu, I found myself drinking a lot more tea, seeing a bunch of castles, and visiting a lot more temples and shrines- but ones which are quite different from the famous temples/shrines of Kyoto and Nara. And I also went into the Kita Alps, which, to someone who is used to hiking in Taiwan, is a major “what? WHAT!” (what? hot baths in mountain shelters? WHAT! THEY LET PEOPLE HOLD A HIGH-ALTITUDE RACE IN THE MIDDLE OF A TYPHOON!)

After this second trip, I was not happy to leave Japan. I was excited about my next destination (if you look carefully at this post, you can figure out where it is), but I was not happy about leaving Japan. I was a little sad.

To the extent possible under law,the person who associated CC0
with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring
rights to this work.

– unusualmusic linked to things written by aseuxals, which a) made sure she did not mess up when talking about asexuality because she let the asexuals do most of the talking and b) highlighted the asexual bloggers rather than herself
– unusualmusic linked in asexual blogs in generalized linkspams which were not specifically about asexuality. This is a great way to spread awareness of asexuality – after all, people who are not aware of asexuality probably are not reading much specifically about asexuality
– likewise, my classmate brought up asexuality casually in a discussion when it happened to fit into the conversation, rather than forcing asexuality into a conversation and Making It a Big Deal (sometimes asexuality is a big deal, but I think it is generally better for allies to casually mention asexuality once in a while and let asexuals themselves take the lead when Asexuality Is a Big Deal).

In other words, I am asking allies to mention asexuality sometimes when it is relevant, and to direct people to what asexuals are actually saying rather than talk about asexuality in place of the asexuals themselves. I have personally been helped by this kind of allyship.

And I base my own advocacy based on what has worked for me – namely, mentioning asexuality in different contexts. This blog is not all about asexuality all the time. I like to talk about different topics, mostly because I like to talk about different topics, but also because I hope I can introduce people who are reading about A that there is also B. For example, I suspect some people who first started reading me because of my blogging about Chinese language and culture at Manga Bookshelf and Hacking Chinese later became interested in my asexuality-themed writing. In the other direction, sometimes people who initially find this blog through the asexual content become interested in things I have written on other topics.

I do not think I will ever be the kind of visibility activist who runs an asexuality-focused organization, or even deliver a formal Asexuality 101 presentation. Bringing up asexuality in different contexts is most of the “visibility-work” I do (here is an example of me doing this in a college classroom), and I think this type of visibility work complements more focused activism quite well.

To the extent possible under law,the person who associated CC0
with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring
rights to this work.

Ever since I started this blog, I have slept every night on an island. The only times I have been on a continent were the day trips I made to Kowloon and the New Territories in Hong Kong and the Macau peninsula.

Here is a list of all of the islands I have been to since the start of this blog, not including artificial islands, islands where I did not step off the boat/bus, islands without freshwater, or islands within lakes:

That may seem like a lot of islands … but Japan alone has over 400 inhabited islands. One could spend a lifetime traveling around the islands of Northeast Asia.

Why do I have such a thing for islands? It is because islands juxtapose isolation and connection.

Islands are isolated enough that they can develop their own unique character. Isolation often means that islands preserve things (cultural practices, forests, governments, etc.) which have been lost in the “mainland”. I would say that every island on the list has a distinct atmosphere different from any other island (okay, I admit that I blur Honshu and Kyushu together in my mind a bit, and that Beigan is a lot like Nangan).

In this respect, the Yaeyama islands particularly stand out: in spite of being so close to Taiwan, they feel very different, in spite of once being part of the Ryukyu Kingdom, they feel very different from Okinawa, and Ishigaki, Iriomote, and Taketomi are so different from *each other* that it is incredible that they are all less than an hour away from each other by ferry.

As one Taiwanese person put it ‘Taiwan’s islands do not feel like Taiwan’. Of course not – Taiwan is an island, and though those other islands are under the same government as Taiwan, and some people on those islands identify as Taiwanese, they are separate islands.

Yet islands are often points of connections. Some islands have historically or continue to be major centers of maritime trade, and they are often places where different species can mix (Lanyu/Green Island, for example, has plant species from both Taiwan and the Philippines, as well as endemic species found nowhere else in the world), and where different human cultures can mix. Macau/Taipa is a classic example, though many other islands on the list – such as Kinmen and Okinawa – are also excellent examples of cultural-exchange islands.

In some ways, Hong Kong Island is the best example. On the one hand, it is the location of one of the most famous cities in the world, a major financial center, tons of human history, culture, and engineering feats, and amazing human population density. Yet in addition to being a human metropolis, it is also an avian metropolis since it is along major bird migration routes and Hong Kong has some really good bird habitat. Furthermore, 40% of Hong Kong Island is covered by forest, there are many wild animals running around – including a ridiculous number of wild butterflies – there are little waterfalls and brooks in the woods, there are beaches which look like they belong to vacation island rather than an urban island, and there are ancient rock carvings. Oh, and there is a peak high enough to create clouds to rain on everybody. There is even a species of frog which is only found in the islands of Hong Kong.

There is so much wildlife in Hong Kong because the hills are so steep that they inhibit human ‘development’ (and when people try to develop them, nature gets revenge with landslides and water system disruptions), at the border of land and sea different biological resources can get pooled together and, being islands, some species which cannot survive on the mainland can find refuge in isolation. Likewise, Hong Kong has historically been a melting pot of Chinese, British, Indian, and many other cultures, and much of its cultural and political vibrancy is due to the fact that it has been a place where Chinese people have had greater freedom of expression than in mainland China – in short, because of Hong Kong’s unique combination of isolation (from Chinese government control) and connection (to China and the world outside of China).

Perhaps I should not go to continental Eurasia next week.

To the extent possible under law,the person who associated CC0
with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring
rights to this work.